TSegAgent: Zero-Shot Tooth Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Vision-Language Agents

arXiv cs.CV / 3/23/2026

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Key Points

  • TSegAgent reframes dental analysis as zero-shot geometric reasoning rather than a purely data-driven recognition task.
  • It combines the representational power of general-purpose foundation models with explicit geometric inductive biases derived from dental anatomy, enabling tooth instances and identities to be inferred without task-specific training.
  • By encoding structural constraints such as dental arch organization and volumetric relationships, the method reduces uncertainty in ambiguous cases and mitigates overfitting to particular shape distributions.
  • Experimental results demonstrate accurate segmentation and identification with low computational and annotation cost and strong generalization to unseen dental scans.

Abstract

Automatic tooth segmentation and identification from intra-oral scanned 3D models are fundamental problems in digital dentistry, yet most existing approaches rely on task-specific 3D neural networks trained with densely annotated datasets, resulting in high annotation cost and limited generalization to scans from unseen sources. Thus, we propose TSegAgent, which addresses these challenges by reformulating dental analysis as a zero-shot geometric reasoning problem rather than a purely data-driven recognition task. The key idea is to combine the representational capacity of general-purpose foundation models with explicit geometric inductive biases derived from dental anatomy. Instead of learning dental-specific features, the proposed framework leverages multi-view visual abstraction and geometry-grounded reasoning to infer tooth instances and identities without task-specific training. By explicitly encoding structural constraints such as dental arch organization and volumetric relationships, the method reduces uncertainty in ambiguous cases and mitigates overfitting to particular shape distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that this reasoning-oriented formulation enables accurate and reliable tooth segmentation and identification with low computational and annotation cost, while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse and previously unseen dental scans.

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